Hi all, I'm new to this forum but this seems like a good place to share my build. I've been documenting for some time now but haven't made the leap to post in online in full. I intend this discussion to be my full attempt at that. Currently, this build is a decent way along, it is the ride in my avatar.
I don't want to seem old, but I don't put a lot of time in on forums, so if I am going about this the wrong way or something isn't right, with how I am putting building this discussion please let me know, but my plan is to post this by chapters essentially as I have a lot documented and tons of pics to show along the way. This is intended solely for others to enjoy and be inspired by.
I was walking around some property where my in-laws kept some of their projects and I noticed a new addition parked. It was a 1987 Toyota extra cab, or what was left of one anyway. My wife’s uncle had purchased it from a friend and had grand plans for it, just like we all do. I’d never really seen one up to this point or really had interest in one but I was intrigued by this one. It had a 22R in it that supposedly ran just fine yet, but the frame was SO bad! Bad enough that the uncle decided against it and offered it to me some time later for free.
Now, I didn’t really have a reason to need a Toyota pickup or even a good motor encapsulated in a bucket of rust, but I had started to envision a rock crawler build and thought the cab could serve as decent start to a sort of Truggy. So, I brought this thing home. Sure enough, within minutes, a friend and I had this 22R barking to life, so we hoped in it and drove it through my woods. The longer we rode in it the closer we sank to the ground. We came to a point where one of the cross members was laying on the rear driveshaft and that was the only thing keeping the cab from dragging on the ground.
At this point, it seemed logical to just start blowing it apart to ultimately get to a rust-free start. I started cutting off the rear axle. I then moved it into the shop to start the dismantling process.
I had no dilutions about how bad the frame was. I knew it was too far gone to consider. At the time, I was getting free steel crates from my work that were used to ship large CNC mills. I was cutting those down and using them to build things from. The frame of these were long lengths of 3” C-channel. I thought that could make for a suitable frame replacement. I knew my build would consist of solid axles, and I was really liking the look of some exo cages folks were building at the time, and I knew a cage was going to be a must anyway. That is where my vision ended at the time.
As I developed the rest of my wants out the build, I opted to just sort of copy the old frame from the front to the back of the cab. From there I had started developing the idea of using a quarter elliptical setup like I had seen on a 70’s pre-runner. So, the work began building the frame.
I'm not going to post everything today. I'll try and post a chapter or 2 every week and keep this going until I catch up to where I am currently.
Once I had the frame to a point of cradling the engine/trans/tcase, I began the extensive cab rust repair. Since this didn’t have rocker anymore anyway, I used some of that scrap steel to make some rock guard rockers. I had to replace like 80% of the floor. For that, I just bought fresh sheet metal and bent it out nice with my harbor freight bead roller. This work was exhausting to me, and I almost threw the towel in right there. But, when I would get sick of it, I’d just through it in the corner of the garage for while and come back to it when I was reinspired.
Then one of the milestones came. The day I welded the new frame and the cab together. That was a turning point for ambition for me. I think it was because it was the first time I was looking at this as building instead of taking apart and repairing.
Damn dude! You've got some skills and you're actually saving something I didn't think could be saved. It has been tough for me to watch, but I can't look away. Maybe you should name it Train Wreck.
My researching had led me to decide to start with 8” Toyota axles. Some foreshadowing, I'm not sure I'd do that the same way now. I picked these because I knew I wanted 37" tires, and most the feedback I found at the time suggested they would survive that if they were beefed up. I'm not so sure anymore, but I'll report more on that in the future. Up to this point I hadn't had a set of axles to start with, so it sat in the corner until the day I found a set.
I had made the decision to find some Humvee wheels/tires then recenter those but I hadn't sourced those yet, but I wasn't going to wait on those to start building the front suspension. I started mocking up where I wanted the front axle to land and made decisions about how the front suspension was going to be built. All my link ends were sourced from Barnes 4x4. I didn’t really want to worry about bending my bottom links, so I made them from 2-1/4" x 0.375” DOM tubing and the upper out of 2"x 0.250" DOM.
For the front, I decided to build a simple 3-link setup. The axles I used had already been under a different custom rig with plenty of aftermarket mounts that I needed to cut off and start clean.
I had a heck of a time deciding how I wanted to fix the lower mounts to the Toyota. I struggled to find a way to mount using the existing crossmember I had built from scratch a while back. I tried and tried but ultimately scrapped it. I built these "torque boxes?" and connected them with a piece of square 1-1/2" x 0.250" to provide the strength the frame would need to keep them held in place. Looking at these now, I was never in love with this design, but they seem to function well.
That square stock that connects the 2 mount boxes would now serve as a trans mount as well. I was pretty happy with this turn out. Too bad, I hadn't really thought through the future doubler t-case. Yes, I would again have to change my trans mount scheme in the future.
Now with the mounts mocked in place, it was time to focus on how I would mount springs. I ended up using stock Jeep Wrangler TJ Sport front coils. I had two big unknowns fighting me this whole way, not truly knowing where the tires would land when articulated and not knowing how much weight would be on the front end all said and done. So I had to guess on a spring perch height.
Once I had the links built and link perches in place, I found my set of hummer wheels and tires.
I recentered the wheels to fit the axle. I spent a lot of time cycling the suspension, looking for points of contact and where I might be constrained. Honestly, its tight up there. I have a couple spots that touch off in very particular turns and angles but everything seems to survive pretty well considering it was not made from a CAD drawing.
You're really getting after it.
After notching my passenger side frame rail, my panhard bar just barely clears the oil pan. And the upper link is so close to the slave cylinder that I had to swap the mounting bolts to pan heads.
After the front end was solidly mounted in place, I was mentally exhausted with geometry for a while, so I pushed the truck into the corner. But then 2020 came around. The world shut down. I was bored and I had already ordered most everything I thought I needed to bring the rear suspension to life. With a whole new sense of free time, I went to work to create a 4-link rear suspension.
First things first, keep in mind that none of this has been put into CAD. I was designing as I went. I used to do a lot of CAD work, and I find it can stifle creativity in the moment sometimes. This was kind of an art project. With all that said, the first thing was to guess where the center of gravity was and the best thing to help with that for me, was a piece of rope.
For springs, I decided to give quarter ellipticals a try. I chose to use a 99-06 GM 2500 rear spring pack for this job. I wasn’t sure how this would all work out, and frankly was prepared to bite the bullet and get myself some coil overs for the rear if it didn’t go well. But it actually works pretty well.
There is not much doubt that coil overs would reign supreme here, but I was still attempting to be budget conscious. I guess this is a great time to interject and make known that up to this point the Toyota’s project name was still “Cheapota”. A laughable name at this point.
In this first picture, you'll see a bunch of pieces of tube behind the bracket. I ended up designing this to be able to be raised or lowered by 1/2" increments since I had no idea how the ride height would end up in the end. I've adjusted this a couple times since building and was happy to have that.
I was looking to achieve a zero-bind suspension. Now most quarter elliptical suspension that I have ever seen will not offer this because as your axle flexes the point on the axle will move inboard and the pack is typically hard mounted to the frame. I did not want that, so I came up with this design which allowed the pack to articulate horizontally and thus not create a bind. Now was this needed? No, probably not. I wanted to do something unique, and this fit the bill for me.
Now with the quarter elliptical in place and all the geometry looking like it is going to work out. It was time to finish building links and link mounts. I didn’t want to build out the upper links without understanding where the springs would need room for travel which is why I opted to build these out first.
I feel the need to add a little prelude here. This was version one of this articulating spring pack monstrosity and was flawed. It ultimately led to a failure, so if you think it’s cool and want to try it yourself, you’ll need to see my second revision later.
Time for painting. The one thing I don’t really show in the build process was the quarter elliptical end mounts. I ended up cutting the brackets and welding heim joint nuts to them so that they would mount without bind to the axle as you can see in the painted version of the rear suspension.
<- official MUD welcome.
but I can't look away. Maybe you should name it Train Wreck. 
